Lethal Passage Quotes

“Yet by tracing the migration of guns, one comes readily and vividly to understand where the nation’s current patchwork of gun controls have gone astray, and how easily they could be fixed to the increased satisfaction of gun owners and gun opponents alike.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“Homicide, or rather the homicide fantasy, is the engine that drives America’s fascination with guns. Target shooters spend hour after hour”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“endearing”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“Yet gun dealers sell guns in America the way Rite Aid sells toothpaste, denying at every step of the way the true nature of the products they sell and absolving themselves of any and all responsibility for their role in the resulting mayhem.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“Buying a gun should be the most difficult consumer ritual in America, instead of one of the easiest. Toughening acquisition will not harm legitimate gun owners. The right laws, in fact, can only help them. The right laws can reduce the incidence of impulsive teenage suicides. The right laws can limit the firepower of street guns and undoubtedly save the lives of a few innocent bystanders. The right laws, moreover, can give even gun buffs a greater appreciation of the dangers inherent in the weapons they buy and demonstrate society’s conviction that owning a gun imparts a monumental responsibility to the owner. The right laws could at last bring firearms into the twentieth century in terms of consumer-product safety. Who knows, someday our firearms manufacturers, so adept at devising ever more lethal weapons and ammunition, may even come up with a childproof gun.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“Roughly half the federal firearms licensees don’t maintain a bona fide store, according to ATF, but operate instead out of their homes. Some of these “kitchen-table” dealers sell guns at gun shows, but many don’t deal guns at all; they hold a license simply to buy their guns at cheap wholesale prices. A small but obviously important segment use their licenses to buy guns wholesale for distribution to inner-city arms traffickers.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“gun dealers in general operate in a world where profit and morality bear an inverse relationship to each other—where a truly moral dealer who followed his best social instincts at every turn would more than likely wind up on a bread line. What does it mean that even a “good” dealer can wind up promoting crime? Has gun retailing become simply too costly a pursuit for our society to tolerate?”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“Reports from the new database have already battered the NRA’s “guns don’t kill” stance, proving beyond doubt that certain guns turn up during the commission of crime far more often than others.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“The gun industry has long contended that only a small percentage of guns are used in crime, while at the same time resisting efforts to document the true number and to identify the most popular crime guns by maker,”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“There is ample proof of the industry’s disregard for the health and safety of its customers. In a time when even children’s vitamins have childproof caps and electric drills have safety triggers, gun manufacturers still do not manufacture child-safe guns.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“Guns kill people. That’s what they’re for. They kill people. And there’s just too many of them out there already.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“Gun magazines feed America’s gun owners a steady diet of advice on how to behave during a gunfight, much of it written by police officers from small-town departments no one has ever heard of and where gun battles are few and far between. Typically, these stories fail to discuss the emotional aftermath of an armed confrontation. Big-city police departments know the psychic toll can be devastating.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“The overall ratio of injuries to deaths for all accidents of all kinds in America was 94 to 1; for household accidents, 151 to 1. If the 105-to-1 ratio were indeed accurate, it would indicate that 157,600 accidental, nonfatal gunshot injuries occur each year.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“Once a child understands how a gun operates and has heard the sound of a gunshot and witnessed the potential damage, he or she will have a different view of a gun and will gain respect for it.” Dr. Kellermann, the Emory University researcher, called this idea “well-intended but hopelessly naive.” Parents overestimate the good sense of their children and their ability to resist outside pressures, he said. “Teaching a child respect for a gun doesn’t change the child’s willingness to use it if he’s depressed, if he just failed a test that he felt the rest of his life depended on, or just broke up with his girlfriend or he’s mad at his best friend. Tragedies of this kind are played out in this country on almost a daily basis.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“Parents, however, seem all too willing to ignore the risks and to assume that their own kids are responsible enough to recognize the harm guns can do and to learn to “respect” them.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“study of accidental shooting deaths of children in California highlighted how a momentary lapse of vigilance by gun owners could quickly lead to tragedy, even in households that treated guns with exemplary care. In one case, the study reported, a six-year-old boy shot himself in the head with a handgun he found “in the purse of a houseguest.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“But a gun that is accessible to the parent is, by definition, just as accessible to the parent’s children or anyone else who visits the home, be it a jealous boyfriend or drunken spouse. Researchers fear the gun industry’s strategy of pitching handguns to women, particularly professional women and single mothers, will only heighten the risk to children.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“We’re seeing the same thing we saw with promoting cigarettes,” said Dr. Wintemute, the University of California researcher. “An inherently hazardous product is being associated with images of equality for women, of liberation for women, of independence for women, with the added approach of using fear—which you can’t use to sell cigarettes but you can certainly use to sell guns.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“Gun manufacturers now peddle their weapons to women using advertisements that show guns juxtaposed with photographs of small children and that describe gun ownership as a necessary act of women’s liberation.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“In one of the most compelling studies of the impact of firearm proliferation, Dr. Arthur Kellermann, an emergency-medicine physician at Emory University, and associates from the Universities of Washington and British Columbia studied the rates of homicide and assault in Seattle and Vancouver from 1980 through 1986. The cities are close to each other. They have similar economies and similar geophysical locations. Their populations have a similar demographic profile. Presumably they watch the same movies and many of the same TV shows. During the study period, they also had similar assault rates. They differed markedly, however, in the degree to which they regulated access to firearms. Vancouver allowed gun sales only to people who could demonstrate a legitimate reason for having a firearm. Seattle had few regulations. The researchers found that attackers in Seattle were almost eight times more likely to use a handgun than those in Vancouver. Seattle’s homicide rate, moreover, was five times higher, with handgun-related killings accounting for most of the difference.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“although handguns only account for about a third of the guns owned in America, they are used in more than 75 percent of gunshot homicides and 80 percent of firearm-related robberies.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“A Pittsburgh psychiatric hospital reported that the mere presence of a gun in the home more than doubles the odds that an adolescent member of the family will commit suicide.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“A Pittsburgh psychiatric hospital reported that the mere presence of a gun in the home more than doubles the odds that an adolescent member of the family will commit suicide. In 1987, Dr. Garen Wintemute, a researcher with the University of California”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“A landmark study in King County, Washington, which includes Seattle, found that a gun kept at home was forty-three times more likely to be used to kill its owner, a family member, or a friend than an intruder.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“The firearms industry and gun lobby have a vested interest in suppressing detailed information on gunshot injuries and accidents, especially when such numbers are linked to specific models of firearms.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“The Consumer Product Safety Commission, responsible for monitoring injuries from virtually every other consumer product, does not tally gunshot injuries because its founding legislation explicitly excluded firearms from its jurisdiction.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“Every day, the handguns of America kill sixty-four people: twenty-five of the dead are victims of homicide; most of the rest shoot themselves. Handguns are used to terrorize countless others: over the next twenty-four hours, handgun-wielding assailants will rape 33 women, rob 575 people, and assault another 1,116.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“Over the last two years firearms killed almost 70,000 Americans, more than the total of U.S. soldiers killed in the entire Vietnam War. Every year handguns alone account for 22,000 deaths.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“I learned too that no federal agency is empowered to oversee the design and manufacture of firearms and investigate safety defects. The Consumer Product Safety Commission can order the recall of toy guns, just not real ones.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

“carried with him a cultural bloodlust fed by marketers and their close allies in the gun press who routinely play to America’s homicide fantasy and stoke our widespread belief in the gun as problem-solver.”
― Erik Larson, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun